


Come Back To Me

by Batastic_Grayson



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood and Violence, Castiel in Purgatory (Supernatural), Castiel/Dean Winchester First Kiss, Castiel/Dean Winchester in Purgatory, Character Death, Dean Winchester Says "I Love You", Dean Winchester in Purgatory, Deathbed Confession, Episode: s15e09 The Trap, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Forests, Hurt, Hurt Castiel (Supernatural), Injured Castiel (Supernatural), Love Confessions, M/M, Multi, Nighttime, Poetic, Purgatory, Sad Ending, The Author Regrets Everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:34:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23388196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Batastic_Grayson/pseuds/Batastic_Grayson
Summary: S15E09. Dean and Cas find themselves trapped in Purgatory again together. They've made it through some pretty close scrapes before, but they can't outrun fate forever. Whatever bridges burned between them dissolve when Cas is gravely injured, and they are forced to face a clock now winding down abruptly.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 9
Kudos: 56





	Come Back To Me

**Author's Note:**

> I manipulated the timeline a bit to suit my preferences. For the sake of moodiness, the time set is more nocturnal in Purgatory. I've also assumed for the sake of this fic that Sam is somehow able to travel to Purgatory himself. Please excuse any plot holes this creates with the rest of the story arc. 
> 
> Also, I am so sorry. This one's a real doozy. If you are looking for heart wrenching, you've come to the right place. As always, I don't own the characters, but I do own the story. Thanks for reading!

It was a night not unlike many when it occurred.

The moon rested above an otherwise blightless sky, round stomach pressing into the horizon dotted by the cragged and crooked shadows of trees stripped bare. Below her, yellow-straw grass bent beneath the tongue of a creeping wind, the kind that gusts and grumbles and disappears in turns, the kind to drag fingertips against glass and raise the hairs along spines. The air was rife with the sounds of branches mingling discontentedly together, stale bark creaking in time with the discordant shuffle of autumnal birds migrating south. The rifle of air whispering along deadened trees brought the smell of decay, sweetened by the crisp undercut of rain an afternoon past, and the sharp, distinct tang of blood.

It wasn’t altogether odd that this particular evening should boast an array of odors so contrasting, considering the struggle taken place in the woods below. It had passed, and the cacophony of sharp breaths, shouts, and gleaming blades had faded into near stillness. New sounds had begun to tear the natural stillness so often found beyond the moon’s watchful gaze, and they were terrible, terrible sounds indeed.

The first to be noted—the pierce of footsteps picking through underbrush, carefully, cautiously, growing in urgency. He was looking for something, somewhere, lost beneath the shadows of bracken and leaf. Cas. He’d lost Cas.

The second to be noted—sharp, pained sounds of effort, the kind produced by a body almost too broken to be considered alive anymore. Dean. He’d lost Dean.

Mingling with them, the gentle words, whispered from lips chapped and bloody, a prayer flowing in mist towards the questing footsteps. “Dean...Dean…” The footsteps halted for a moment, listening intently. The voice tried again, louder now, a fragile wail that seemed halfway drowned in dismay, “Dean!”

The underbrush rumbled with chaos, and an answering tone, desperate, beckoned back from the searcher. “Cas?”

Moments, endless baited moments passed, and almost at once, Dean burst forth into the clearing in which the broken angel lay twisted among the reeds and thorns. His chest was heaving, eyes wildly searching the shadowed ground, and for a moment, it seemed he wouldn’t find Cas. But his vision was keen, and it wasn’t many moments before he found the broken outline of Cas, barely a silhouette against the bed of dirt.

A strangled sound of relief, shifting abruptly into terror as he knelt beside the angel and grasped him in his arms. It felt as though he had grabbed hold of a corpse, slicked with blood and lifeless beneath his palms. Cas cried out at the shift, but he hadn’t the strength to resist the strange embrace or the hurried flutter of Dean’s hands over his figure, “Cas, you bastard—what did you get yourself into, huh? Thought you could take ‘em without me?”

He was working for lightness, but he sounded stricken ill. It wasn’t hard to see why. The injuries were extensive, animalistic and primal—the kind that were specifically designed to kill.

Cas inhaled sharply, tears springing to his eyes when Dean found the chief of the wounds. It was a gash, not unlike a bolt of electricity or the carve of a river, extending from the navel to just below Cas’ sternum. It had been hidden beneath urgent hands, debris, and matted clothes, but its reveal was enough to send the blood retreating abruptly from Dean’s thin expression.

Trembling lips began to whisper brokenly, “I—I’m sorry—I didn’t—I didn’t mean to—”

Dean shook his head vigorously, and his fingertips were dark as night with gore when he grasped Cas’ face, “Hey, hey, no. This is not your fault, okay?”

Tears, tiny pearls that shone like moonstone on that forest floor, began to spill down Cas’ dirt-smeared cheeks, and his expression crumpled in on itself in a way Dean had never seen. “I’m so sorry, Dean—I couldn’t h-hold them all off and—and then I—”

Dean pressed steady hands to the wound, trying to staunch the bleeding. God, it was rivers. Strands unstoppable by his frozen palms. He shook his head, but his voice betrayed him. It was thick with emotion. “Hush now, you’re gonna be just fine, yeah? We’re gonna get you fixed up.”

His eyes, dove grey in this light, strayed to the wound he was holding just barely closed, and his throat worked around a swallow gone sideways, “We’ll just use some of that angel mojo, okay? You’ll be right as rain before we can do any of the sappy speeches.” 

Cas shuddered beneath a chill that had begun creeping from his toes towards his center, like frost slowly, ever so slowly picking at his seams. “My grace—they took…they took my grace.”

A moment of silence stretched, aching and tremulous, between the two men, and Dean blinked rapidly. He knew that Cas was too injured to move by himself. “Alright, well, let’s—we’ll wait for Sam, and he can call 911. We’ll get you to a doctor, right? They can fix this.”

“Dean—we don’t—”

“He’ll come goddammit! You just—” his voice shuddered, and Dean righted himself with a grimace, “You just look at me, alright? Keep your eyes open.”

The forest seemed to loom even more silent in those moments, peering down at the star-crossed lovers, as they could hear no sounds of footsteps come to aid them. Cas knew Dean could hear it too, the tread of time dragging onward, the flow of blood foddering the forest below, the moan of wind whispering of death nearby.

Still, Dean remained stubborn. His eyes were wet with tears, and his desperate breaths sent plumes of mist billowing to the stars above, but he kept pressure on the wound. He whispered quiet assurances that this all would be a vague memory come morning, that Sam was coming. Any moment now, redemption would thrust between the trees and drag them both to a new tomorrow. They would live beyond this terrible night.

Cas had begun to shake violently, his figure trembling as if death’s resonance itself was creeping through his veins. Cas was keenly aware of the coppery taste at the back of his throat, and the soaring of pain that had so consumed his every fiber moments before was beginning to numb, inch by inch, molecule by molecule. The cold was coming for him, spidering over every sinew in his being, and it was with sorrow and urgency that Cas gripped Dean now.

So little time for a love that needed eons to explain.

“D-Dean, we don’t—have much t-time. I—” He shook his head, mouth drawing tight and restrained. Cas had lost feeling in his legs completely, as if he was slowly being pulled beneath the veil, and it was a strange feeling to fight against that—to _wish_ that the pain would continue. Anything to stay. It added that much more urgency when his fingertips rose to rest against Dean’s cheek. Trembling and then steady, firm. Sure. “I—I have so much…so much I wanted to say.”

“Well, you’re not gonna have to say it yet, okay? You’re gonna make it out of this and then—” he faltered, and Cas felt the lie in the way Dean’s expression wilted against his hand.

“Dean—we need—I can’t survive this wound. Y-you know this.” Cold prickled along his fingertips now, numbing them until the impression of Dean’s skin against his was like trying to kiss the wind.

“No…no. This is not goodbye, alright? Cas we—” It was the first real break in Dean’s façade, and a desperate sob, like an animal stabbed, slipped into the little space between them. His voice went feather soft, childlike when he whispered, “I just got you back. I can’t lose you like this, Cas. I—I _won’t_.”

It was becoming harder to breathe, every breath a massive effort to produce a wheezed symphony of life barely tethering him here. Cas traced the line of Dean’s brow with a trembling fingertip—he couldn’t feel the warm silk of the skin there, but it felt right even so.

“You _must_. This is—my time, Dean. Y-you must let me go.”

The man above Cas was veiled by moonlight, and although his expression was haunted and tears were dribbling from the tip of his nose, he seemed a work of art in that moment. Sorrow and agony, feathered like cold steel between his ribs—it was exquisite pain to view his love like this. Cas pressed into the bruise, willed himself to study Dean’s every feature. The slope of his brows drawn in pain, the freckles sparsely dotting the nose, the perfect lips he had never allowed himself to kiss, not even once. Cas looked, he studied, and he wept silent, piteous tears.

Too late, too late, too late…

“No, no…no.” Tears blurred Dean’s vision, and the angel now pulled into his arms became bleary and distorted. A cry like a child’s fell from his lips, and he drew Cas further into him, pressing, pressing every bit of them together in a desperate plea to memorize the man he never had the chance to love properly.

“I can’t do this without you, Cas. I—I don’t _want_ to.”

A rattling breath, pressed close to Dean’s collarbone as Cas whispered, “I rebelled…I rebelled for _you_ , Dean. And I have felt…I have—I have loved you since.”

A terrible beat of silence, followed by a hollow, “All this time?”

“Yes.” A prayer, an alleluia of sorts in that word. Cas had no time to hesitate. His abdomen was nearly numb. “And—and you…”

“Yes.”

Alleluia, filtering up between eaves of broken branches and glittering stars. Two men in love and too late.

Arms wound with iron gripped Cas tighter. He could no longer feel his chest. His body had journeyed into the nether without him, and the rest was soon to follow, but he could feel the shudder in Dean’s shoulders as they wept together. Dean drew their faces together, and as if it were the most natural thing, he kissed Cas with lips chilled and trembling. It was a kiss that tasted like tears and leaves fallen and things long untouched, and yet Cas was glad he stayed long enough in that realm to experience it.

More feeling lost. The world was beginning to narrow around him, closing around that fated kiss captured beneath inky stars and monsters’ claws. One breath, two. His heart was slowing, sand draining from the sieve into oblivion. Dean could see the shadow crossing over Cas’ face, a slate wiping clean and leaving blown pupils and chilled tongue in the place of life.

What can be said of those seconds that transpired after Cas uttered his final breath? Rather little.

The ghosts of trees looming like tattoos, pressing wet ink into bruised skin, as Dean begged for him to stay in a tone that couldn’t be replicated in script had all the poets and artists tried. A voice, raw and broken, mumbling against skin long since cold.

Come back to me. Come back to me. Come back to me.

Dean’s lips were still tingling with that kiss when he at last released the corpse back to the forest floor. He laid his unknown lover into the embrace of the tree roots and sweet maple leaves left to decay, and he asked them to hold Cas for a moment, just a moment, as he tried desperately to hold himself together. He would hold him again in a second—he only needed one moment. Please, if they would.

Ages, hours, seconds, upon moments passed, before the beam of a flashlight shone from the distant reaches of the woodland night. It bobbed and flashed between trees with the haunted pattern of one running, and a voice filtered through the twilight in a strident shout. It was Sam.

He was here. Finally, blessedly, here.

Dean reached a hesitant hand to feather through Cas’ hair numbly, his eyes following the path of the light as it found them huddled in the forest hollow. He inhaled a whispered breath, stroking absently, fondly.

“We’re going home, Cas.” 


End file.
